PASADENA – All across the last three days of the football season, the last arguments standing in the way of progress began tumbling like so many dominoes. Anyone with a set of eyes and a helping of common sense could see it. Whether that includes the presidents and chancellors of America’s finest universities remains to be seen.

The arguments against a national playoff system have always been archaic anyway, and they’ve always been terribly detached from reality. Usually, they fall into two separate arguments.

1. The athletes will miss too much class time.

2. The bowl system will lose its relevance.

The first has always been an asinine point behind which to stand, because as anyone who’s ever been to college knows, if there’s one time in the whole calendar year in which to hold an extra week of playoffs, it’s the first weeks of January – when there are no classes being held.

Sam Johnson is a University of Texas sophomore. He’s been in California since the day after Christmas. He will be here through the weekend. He came here with about a dozen of his closest friends from Austin, all of whom were able to score tickets for last night’s Rose Bowl game between Texas and USC.

“Basically, we decided we’d take our spring break a few weeks early this year,” Johnson said yesterday morning, as he and his buddies had a few warm-up beers in the lobby of the Renaissance Hollywood hotel. “Hey, it’s the same difference to us. We have no classes now. We have no classes if we’d decided to go to Florida in March. It’s the same thing. Why not take in some football instead?”

Johnson is a business major. His buddies, he says, are communications majors, psychology majors, pre-med majors, pre-law majors. None of them will be missing class. Which means none of the athletes for whom they intended to cheer themselves hoarse will be missing classes either.

“My older brother made a long weekend of it when we went to the Final Four in New Orleans a few years ago,” Johnson said. “He missed a lot of classtime then, because he’d followed the team to the regionals, too. And I know the players missed class. Nobody seems to ever talk about that, though.”

Missed class time was always nothing more than a convenient – if incorrect – scapegoat anyway. The argument that always seemed to have more credence was the idea that college football would be abandoning a significant part of its past by abandoning the core bowl games that have shaped its history.

It made sense, too. The four major bowls – Rose, Orange, Sugar, Fiesta – were long the foundation around which every major-college team built its season, and its program. Conference tie-ins made them the ultimate carrot for every player in America, and in the days prior to the BCS, it wasn’t unusual for all four of those games – plus the Cotton Bowl – to be able to make legitimate arguments in support of its participant teams.

Rotating the BCS title game, the argument goes, minimizes the impact of those classic bowls. Using them as, essentially, semifinal play-in games in a revamped playoff system would make them even less viable.

What this year’s games have proven, if nothing else, is how silly an argument that really is, how silly it’s always been. The three BCS bowls heading into yesterday’s granddaddy at the Rose Bowl had everything you could ever possibly want.

They had classic, old-school matchups (Notre Dame-Ohio State). They had classic, old-coach matchups (Penn State-Florida State). They had one huge underdog (West Virginia) pulling an epic shocker against a huge favorite (Georgia) that was essentially playing a home game.

In all cases, you had stadiums filled with color and pageantry and two games (Sugar and Orange) that kept college football fans awake long past their bedtimes. In all cases what you had was everything you could possibly have wanted: games that made every college fan in America look with eager anticipation toward Texas-USC.

No negatives to speak of, wherever you look. Which is exactly as it should be. Now. And whenever they get around to installing a real playoff system.